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Brittany Jones is burrowed into her seat on a BART car, catching some sleep before the morning commuters arrive. As the car starts to fill with people, she finally pulls down her jacket, uncovering her face. The whoosh of the doors, the sweaty surge of denim and backpacks: This is her alarm clock.

The saying “dogs are a man’s best friend” is just a phrase, but to those living on the streets and battling housing insecurity, it can be the honest truth. For people who are contending with homelessness, their companion animals are the world to them. They are their family, their children and their sense of security. But getting proper medical care for their animals can often be even harder than getting it for themselves.

This is where Veterinary Street Outreach Services comes in. Vet SOS is a veterinary pop-up clinic run through the San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium’s Street Outreach Services and provides free veterinary care to the companion animals of San Francisco’s homeless community. Founded 10 years ago by local veterinarian Ilana Strubel, the clinics happen 12 times a year. Each clinic is staffed entirely by volunteers, from the intake staff all the way to the veterinarians themselves.

Residents in the northeastern Mission District are forming a community group to push local government toward ending homeless encampments in the area, while a pair of nuns displaced from the Tenderloin tries to gather support for a soup kitchen in the neighborhood that neighbors fear will attract only more homeless.

The nuns are Marie Benedicte and Marie Valerie of the Fraternite Notre Dame Mary of Nazareth, and their appearance surprised even Andrew Presley, a resident of Natoma Street and one of the organizers of a neighborhood meeting on Monday night.

When it comes to doing business, Leaf isn’t discreet. The friendly 25-year-old saunters around Dolores Park in San Francisco with a big teddy bear on his shoulder and a ring of plastic marijuana leaves around his neck. You can’t miss him.

Selling weed is his game, one he won’t quit anytime soon. Yes, recreational cannabis was just legalized in California on Nov. 8, heralding a new era of pot consumption in America’s most populated state. But he’s not worried.

“I’ll still be out here, because what happens when you don’t want to go out to the club?” Leaf said of recreational dispensaries. “It’s about convenience, and I always have stuff on me. I’m right here.”

The number of seniors in California is expected to more than double by 2060, from roughly 5 million to 12 million. A new report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office says this future senior population will be more racially diverse than seniors in the U.S. as a whole: The state’s elderly population is projected to become majority nonwhite as soon as 2030.

The proportion of these future seniors who are disabled will also increase. That’s because nonwhite populations have higher disability rates. Seniors are also expected to live longer, and seniors over age 85 experience higher disability rates as well.

Amid heightened concerns about rising sea levels around the Bay Area, San Francisco International Airport officials are scrambling to make emergency repairs to a seriously damaged concrete wall that protects SFO’s airfield from the bay.

The airport’s top official called the damage to the seawall along SFO’s perimeter “an imminent threat to airport property” in a letter to the Airport Commission in September.

To defend undocumented immigrants from incarceration and deportation under a Donald Trump administration, Supervisor David Campos and other city officials are pushing for $5 million in funding to hire attorneys to the Public Defender’s office and community nonprofits.

Campos’s joint proposal with Public Defender Jeff Adachi hinges on the idea that those facing immigration proceedings should have legal counsel, like any other person accused of a crime. Currently, undocumented immigrants facing deportation do not have the right to a court-appointed attorney, though some are able to find lawyers through nonprofits.

Immigrants facing proceedings are four times as likely to win their cases with a lawyer on their side – if they have been detained, a lawyer makes it seven times as likely that they will prevail, according to the California Coalition for Universal Representation.

The report’s findings were unequivocal: Given the current pace of water diversions, the San Francisco Bay and the delta network of rivers and marshes are ecological goners, with many of its native fish species now experiencing a “sixth extinction,” environmental science’s most-dire definition of ecosystem collapse.

Once a vast, soaked marsh and channel fed by the gushing Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, the delta has diminished dramatically over the previous century as those rivers and their mountain tributaries have been diverted to irrigate Central Valley farms and Bay Area urbanity. With winnowing supplies of Chinook salmon available for food, Orcas off the coast are starving. So, too, are seals and fish-eating birds. And the Gulf of the Farallones, a national marine sanctuary, is suffering from a lack of freshwater fed by the bay.

Mitzia Martinez felt so shellshocked after the presidential election that the 19-year-old UC Berkeley student holed up in her apartment for days, away from her friends and her classes. Martinez needed to make sense of the massive changes her life could face under a Trump administration.

Her biggest concerns: losing the ability to support herself financially and, worse, once again feeling vulnerable to deportation.

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